The Warhammer 40,000 galaxy The story moves at a glacial pace, with the major storylines stuck in place for years, sometimes even decades. That’s been true of one of the game’s most popular factions, the green-armored Dark Angels Space Marines, basically since they were introduced to the game in the 1980s. But in March 2023, Lion El’Jonson, the long-lost leader of the Dark Angels, returned from the dead. His return to the Imperium of Mankind is now causing waves within the First Legion, as it is known, for the first time in 10,000 years. And it could be a prelude to something even more divisive.
Each Space Marine chapter is created from a Primarch, one of the Emperor’s genetically engineered sons. In the beginning there were only twenty Primarchs, and over the course of ten millennia they were exterminated – killed, lost, missing, or turned into slobbering demons by the forces of Chaos. The only Primarch left standing was Roboute Guilliman, Primarch of the Ultramarines Chapter and Administrator Extraordinary. In the game’s modern canon, he has taken over leadership of the Imperium, the de facto protagonist of the 40K universe, leaving him in the very unenviable position of both doing all the paperwork for a star-rich empire and dealing with the inevitable demise of the world softens. that same star-spanning empire that has degenerated into religious fanaticism.
Image: Game workshop
For the past decade, the joke about El’Jonson has been that he was secretly buried in the fortress monastery of the Dark Angels known as The Rock, not dead but merely asleep. Last year he mysteriously woke up and arrived in the nick of time as described in the campaign book Arks of Omen: The Lion to pull the collective bacon of the entire Dark Angels chapters out of the fire. Lion El’Jonson is not a politician, and he’s certainly not here to do paperwork. His standalone novel, The Lion: Son of the Forest; the aforementioned campaign book; and the new one Codex Supplement: Dark Angels, when it was offered for pre-order last weekend, make that eminently clear. While Guilliman controls the galaxy’s most complicated Asana board, the Lion is a wandering knight who protects even the most remote provinces of a ragged empire.
Instead of flying with an agency, the Leo spends his time traversing hordes of Tyranids and demons, but what’s really interesting is how he now deals with his wayward sons. The Dark Angels are all the Lion’s boys, and they’ve been spectacularly mischievous while he’s been enjoying a 10,000-year nap after the implosion of his homeworld, Caliban.
During the Horus Heresy – the massive civil war between the Imperium and a chaos-fueled rebellion of Space Marines that took place 10,000 years ago – a slew of Dark Angels defected and became traitors. Some of them puffed on Chaos for immense power, and others simply felt betrayed by the Lion and his stern ways. These traitors were called the Fallen, and the Dark Angels went overboard in their attempts to cover up their treachery.
The fact that the Fallen exist at all is now the central secret upon which the chapter’s most prestigious knighthood, known as the Inner Circle, was created. And at this point, the members of the Inner Circle may have even surpassed the Fallen themselves, compounding the error with all manner of kidnappings, murders, and an institutionalized regime of torture designed to force them to convert or die. Even entire military campaigns, vital conflicts where the Dark Angels were tasked with supporting smaller Imperial military assets, were regularly abandoned altogether in favor of hunting the Fallen.
The return of the Lion has, it seems, helped put the brakes on this all-consuming paranoia.
In the Arks of Omen campaign book and in the novel Son of the forestwe learn that Leo has brought many fallen ones back into the fold after personally working to redeem them. He’s the father of all these Space Marines, and he seems more than willing to take the time to wrestle all his unruly boys into the company jersey. Redeemed Fallen, called the Risen, are now even being integrated back into Dark Angels’ frontline units.
This shift in narrative focus is a welcome relief, especially after decades spent with the Lion locked in a state of torpor. The Fallen are still a threat, but that thread feels less like an all-consuming black hole that drags the Dark Angels away from everything else, damaging their reputation. Now they are positioned more as Knights of the Round Table, adventuring across the grim galaxy in defense of their father’s ideals – and working toward redemption in the eyes of the Emperor of Mankind.
They still like secrets; in fact a couple Companions from the inner circle have suddenly appeared in the Dark Angels army lists. These cloaked figures have sworn a vow of secrecy, and everyone just has to accept them showing up and assisting in all their operations because Papa Lion will vouch for them. I think it’s a safe bet that this is Risen, being integrated back into the fold in a way that’s least likely to cause a stir.
We’ll likely see more of the new internal structures of a post-Lion Dark Angels in an upcoming novel: Lazarus: Hostility Edge by Gary Kloster. The Dark Angels certainly have a lot to worry about. The galaxy is under siege by an unstoppable swarm of Tyranids, half the Imperium is in the grip of Chaos, and the Lion is quite unhappy to know that during his long nap, the Imperium began to worship his father, the Emperor en masse. While the Leo seems quite happy to know that his brother Guilliman is still alive, he is much less happy about the existence of the religious branch of state known as the Ecclesiarchy.
That could end up causing major political chaos for Leo, and we’ll have to see if his devotion to the Emperor’s ideals ultimately causes major unrest in a galaxy that has dropped those norms in favor of worshiping the Emperor as a God. Fans are looking forward to a reunion – and maybe a bro hug – between Lion and Guilliman. But in Warhammer 40,000, nothing is ever simple, and the Lion may be forced to either compromise and acknowledge the megachurch that controls the Imperium… or find himself embroiled in another civil war.
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